Running
without a restart.

If you used the default graphic installer for LinuxPPC 1999, you may get a painful surprise after a few months of use.

It happened to me after I downloaded the kernel source code to make my first home grown kernel. After unstuffing the 12 meg archive, my entire system exhibited problems. The most common error was that I was out of disk space!

This could not be possible because the df command revealed my drive wasn't even half full!

At first I assumed I had corrupted the file system, so I reformatted, and did a full install, but after several months, the same thing would happen. It turns out the problem is that I ran out of Inodes, not disk space. See the listing below from a df -i listing (partition 13 is my Linux root):

Notice I only have 62 Inodes free! It seems that every file, every directory uses up an Inode. The default installer for LinuxPPC gives you only 64,000 Inodes. After installation, up to 55,000 can be used.

Netscape uses a few thousand more with the cache. Install a few applications, keep some source code, loose a few thousand more...

Next thing you know, no more Inodes! Everything grinds to a halt.

The only solution is to reformat the drive before you do an install.

After booting from BootX into the install Ram Disk, open a terminal window in Gnome and manually format the drive (replace X with your root partition number).

mke2fs /dev/hdaX
cd /mnt/
mkdir install
mount /dev/hdaX /mnt/install

Now you can run the installer, but when you assign partitions, don't check the format for the partition you did manually.

After the reformat, look at the Inodes again with the df -i.

That's better! Half a million Inodes. Plenty to last a lifetime. Hopefully, this problem will be fixed with the next release at MacWorld.